MONTICELLO – Sullivan County Treasurer Kathleen Lara announced during the Management and Budget Committee on Thursday, October 8 that a new portal will give officials a better understanding of sales tax generated from short-term rentals.

Lara said the new portal will enable the county to go after those who, through evasion or ignorance, are not paying sales tax on their revenue earned from short-term rentals.

“We contracted with Deckard [Technologies] to help us with all of our short-term rentals,” explained Lara, “because there are over 1,500 in Sullivan County that we know… We’re going to be doing an online registration and payment portal, and this is all being done through Deckard.”

Lara said the portal will help them get much better data on short-term rentals because it will force users to give specific information in order to register, as opposed to having them fill out paperwork, which a user may fill out incompletely.

According to Deckard Technology’s website, their platform called Rentalscape helps municipalities manage compliance for short-term rental properties.

Their website features a case study about Sullivan County in which Lara gives a testimonial to the platform’s efficacy: “We went up over 500 properties with Deckard… without Deckard we would not be at the place we are now with the number of registered people who are aware of the new laws.”

“I looked today and there are over 300 unregistered short-term rentals in Sullivan County right now that we don’t have on our list,” said Lara. “We have 933 active and registered [short-term rentals].”

Lara took a moment to note that not all unregistered people are malicious; she said some don’t know registration is required.

Lara said her office has been actively working with short-term rental platforms like Airbnb and Vrbo to ensure that they are now requiring those renting to provide the county’s certificate of authority number in order to complete registration.

“So we’ll see them and that will help us a lot, and be able to help towns too because you know we have the portal online, they can go check to see if their neighbors are registered. More people are using it than I thought,” Lara said.

District 9 Legislator Terry Bernardo asked, “Who has the authority to audit these places?”

“In our room tax law, the county can audit them,” answered Lara. “The best part about this portal is that we will be able to do audits, and we’ll be able to go out and do visits… and do more enforcement.”